AUL Report- Bob Sewell

Bob began with three items of good news regarding the collections
budget. First, Vice President Seneca has informed us that, as in past
years, he will match $50,000 of the libraries' money to be used for
collection development. Second, President Lawrence will announce in his
State of the University address next week that the new version of
"Reinvest in Rutgers" will include an option for devoting ones
contribution to collections in the libraries. Thirdly and finally, we
have received a large bequest specifically for the purchase of books in
Alexander Library. The amount will be between one and two million
dollars, depending upon the health of the stock market when the estate
is liquidated; presumably the longer we wait, the larger the bequest.
The fund will be set up as a quasi-endowment, which means we could spend
part of the principle as well as the interest. And it could be used for
processing gift collections, as well as purchasing new books.
Considering the state of the market, it is unclear when the money will
become available.

NERL negotiations with Elsevier on the Science Direct subscription
continue to progress. Both sides had targeted September 25 as a
deadline, but that will almost certainly be pushed back. Although the
Monster has committed to a five-percent cap on price increases over the
next three years, this would still be very bad news for our collections
budget (we paid about a cool million last year). Moreover, Mary said
that the way the Elsevier contracts are written, its difficult, if not
impossible, to find ways to save; if we cancel a certain number of
titles, the cost for the remaining titles will rise proportionally.

Kevin asked if we shouldn't be hiring lawyers or using the university
counsel to help us in our negotiations. This led to a lengthy
discussion. Both Bob and Mary argued that, considering the
circumstances, we have the best representation possible. In particular
Ann Okerson at Yale has been very constructive within the limits imposed
by Elsevier's market power and pricing structures.

A Working Group on Usage of Journals in E-journal Packages has been
established. Its purpose is to "analyze the usage of specific journal
titles within e-journal packages … to gain a better understanding of how
packages are used and the value of these products." Howard will chair
the group and will be joined by Veronica, Ann, and Ryan. They will look
closely at the statistics supplied by our vendors and report in
December.

The Metro Selectors will meet at NYU on October 11 at 1PM. This year
will feature a panel on cooperative collection development featuring our
own Jim Niessen.

Acquisitions Report- Mary Page

There continues to be no orders backlog, since monies have yet to be
allocated with which we can place orders. A few selectors have sent some
orders over already. For the sake of fairness, these orders will be
shuffled into the initial deluge of orders that arrive when the funds in
the fund codes become available. Also, there is apparently money
presently available in specifically designated gift funds. Check your
funds to be sure; you can spend on these. The phonathon money should
also be available in the near future.

Acquisitions has done extensive revamping of their workflows and Mary is
confident that when the buying season begins, they will be able to keep
up the pace. In particular, they have plans in place to shift people
from ordering to receiving as the flow of orders dictates.

Grace and Au have weeded and added to our net-Library selections. They
removed the titles published in 1999 and earlier that have never been
used and selected 158 new titles. Including the access fee, we will pay
about $13,000 this year for about 500 titles. Most of this came out of
ELPX, but individual selectors are free to buy additional e-books from
their own funds. Last year we spent approximately $29,000 on
net-Library.

We have decided not to contract with Journal WebCite to manage our
holdings of e-journals. Acquisitions is not entirely confident they
will be able to delivery everything they have promised. Instead, we may
go with Serials Solutions. They offer less functionality, but will
probably suit our purposes. Also, they would charge only $3,000 a year,
compared to $10,000 for Journal WebCite. Serials Solutions will track
and display to our users the e-journals we offer as different titles
move in and out of our various e-journal subscriptions. In particular,
they will provide dates of coverage for each individual title, something
that is currently missing from our e-journals webpage. They will provide
reports of all the titles added and removed from the packages during the
course of a month.

Systems Report- Ann Montanaro

The new ELF equipment has been arriving and is being installed
(including the teleconferencing equipment used for this meeting). All of
the OPACs have been replaced and some of the staff and librarian's
computers will be replaced in the coming weeks.

Next week the images in RLG's AMICO database will migrate to the Luna
software. Systems is also working with certain departments such as
classics to develop sets of images to use for research and instruction.
Sometime in the future they will make available a desktop (vs. web
accessible) version of the software for images in the Art Library.

Cancellations/Allocations- Bob Sewell

Mary sent out before the meeting an updated list of all of the
cancellations we've identified to date. This includes Howard's list,
Ryan's ABI list, Jim's MUSE list and the Gale titles in paper available
electronically from Literature Resource Center and Gale's Ready
Reference Shelf. We also agreed to cut the Kraus Curriculum Development
Library, which has received little use since we acquired it, despite a
good effort to promote it. There was also some discussion about cutting
Biography and Master Genealogy Index, but we declined to do so. At
present these cuts total about $166,000. If we add in inflation for 2003
and the $100,000 we'll raise with Seneca's matching contribution to
collections, we've essentially reached our goal of whacking $300,000
from the budget. And in a reasonably painless matter. No further cuts
will be necessary this year.

Mary suggested two important electronic resources that should be
considered as soon as we are fiscally able. Our plans to subscribe to
the JSTOR Arts & Sciences II collection were derailed by the the budget
crisis last January. Also, formerly we received the electronic version
of the Annual Review titles free with our paper subscriptions. To get
them now we would have to pay an additional $11,000. There was fairly
general agreement that we should hold off on anything new until we know
for certain what the 2003 amounts for the monograph funds.

Allocations for monograph funds will be distributed to the campuses and
to the humanities, social sciences, and sciences representatives
shortly.

Evaluating the collection development component of librarianship for the
promotion process- All

This topic has been discussed at the Coordinating Committee "in light of
expanded roles in the digital environment." The University Librarian, in
an email attached to the agenda for this meeting, has requested each of
the councils to help in developing guidelines. The aim is to provide
each of the levels in the promotion process with clearly articulated
ways of evaluating candidates. The Coordinating Committee is less
interested in specific criteria than in series of questions that might
be posed to shed light on the quality of a candidate's librarianship. We
are asked in particular to consider evolving roles in the electronic
environment. The work of the councils on this issue will be compiled by
the Personnel Policy and Affirmative Action Committee to be discussed
and voted upon by the full faculty. The deadline for our response is
November 15, 2002.

As a start, the following suggestions were offered, in no particular
order of importance:

Developing subject guides and finding aids to the collections.

The quality of the liaison relations developed generally.

Working with donors and others to solicit gifts of money and books.

Helping with the budget process, budget allocations, etc.

Evaluating electronic resources and advancing sound recommendations for new resources or cuts.

Cooperative collection development.

A few more general comments were offered in the course of the
discussion. First, it was noted that the lines between different areas
of librarianship are by no means hard and fast. For example, liaison
work is a fluid mix of public service and collection development.
Second, evaluation is by no means a science; as the University Librarian
implied in her charge, we should not aim for hard and fast rules.
Lastly, there was concern over the how candidates should be evaluated in
collection development when our monies for developing collections are
very meager.

Priorities for Retrospective Conversion- All

At the July meeting in Camden Ruth Bogan joined us to discuss this topic
and agreed to report on the number of uncataloged titles in the
following call numbers: B, C, D, E, F, P, and Z. We all agreed that no
subject could be clearly identified as more important than any other.
Therefore, the simplest way to proceed would be to catalog these call
numbers in Alexander Library in alphabetic order. The one exception we
made was the titles in the Fs falling under "Jerseyana." This is one of
our greatest strengths, one in which we have a well-deserved reputation.
Further, undergraduate history majors are usually required to do at
least one paper with original sources and local history topics are
always popular.

It was noted that it will take about fifteen minutes to convert each
card to a MARC record. Considering the number of titles involved, this
will take a very long time. It will also cost lots of money. Kevin
suggested we seek grant funding.

To make the process more informative, it was suggested that we code
these books to see if how having MARC records effects usage. We will
also use the recon process to identify missing books.

Finis

The meeting concluded at 11:21 PM, very possibly a CDC record. Jim down
in Camden and all of the attendees in New Brunswick felt the
teleconferencing equipment worked well and that we should avail
ourselves of it in the future.